How Google Got Its Colorful Logo

By
Sonia Zjawinski

02.12.08

In just a few short years, Google's logo has become as recognizable as Nike's swoosh and NBC's peacock. Ruth Kedar, the graphic designer who developed the now-famous logo, shows the iterations that led to the instantly recognizable primary colors and Catull typeface that define the Google brand.
Kedar met Google co-founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page through a mutual friend nine years ago at Stanford University, where she was an assistant professor. Page and Brin, who were having trouble coming up with a logo for their soon-to-launch search engine, asked Kedar to come up with some prototypes.
"I had no idea at the time that Google would become as ubiquitous as it is today, or that their success would be of such magnitude," Kedar says.

Google No. 1 Typeface: Adobe Garamond

Left: "It was very clear from the very beginning that they wanted to go with a logotype as opposed to just a logo," Kedar says.
With this first version, Kedar wanted to keep the majority of the text untouched so the legibility was still intact, while adding some playfulness by bringing primary colors and two-dimensionality to the Os. The pattern here was used to visually imply that something goes on ad infinitum. According to Kedar, "Brin and Page liked this because it looks a bit like a Chinese finger trap."